Back when I moved into that house, on another summer day, I’d happily alphabetized the books, separating them into categories: fiction, memoir, biography, poetry, drama, reference. How happy I’d been that day as slowly the books took their places, as my daughter Grace twirled around the empty dining room (we couldn’t yet afford a table and chairs for it) in her sparkly tutu and my son, Sam, sang “Wonder of Wonders” from Fiddler on the Roof. And what a contrast this moving day was, this taking down of all those books and putting them into boxes—FICTION A–C, FICTION M. Sam grown and living in Brooklyn, Grace dead fourteen years, my heart, once so full, now broken again.
I cried as I packed my books. And I screamed. But I smiled too, a lot. As I held each book, deciding if I really needed to take it with me, I could remember reading—and sometimes rereading—it. Here were all my Alice Adams short story collections, a writer hardly known anymore but whose stories I still quote when I teach; my small paperback of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, read on a New York City subway; Bright Lights, Big City, which I bought at the Spring Street Bookstore the day it came out; my dog-eared copies of The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and So Long, See You Tomorrow; three copies of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, all given to me after Grace died to help soothe my grief, which it did (“Her absence is like the sky,” Lewis wrote, “it covers everything”). So many books, each of them returning a piece of myself to me—starry-eyed optimist, new writer, single Manhattan young woman, grief-stricken mother.
My new home had no built-in bookshelves, so my books stayed in the dozens and dozens of boxes until the new IKEA shelves were built; the older, smaller shelves found places in the loft; and still more bookshelves were bought and assembled. Until one day I looked up and the boxes were gone, the books—alphabetized and by genre—lined up again. What is this life? I ask myself almost every day as I look around at my new home, so big and open and sunny. I have two cats, Hermia and Gertrude, who sleep on my feet and lap. I’ve bought a turntable so that I can play my albums again, those songs of my youth also returned to me. And the lines that had so moved me as a teenager, that played even as I sat on my bed and read Love Story, move me still, perhaps even more true all these years later: I have my books, and my poetry to protect me . . .
Lesson 5: How to Write a Book
? The Grapes of Wrath BY JOHN STEINBECK ?
IF ONE BOOK CARRIED MAGIC, IMAGINE WHAT FOUR books could do. Four books nestled together in a box wrapped in red-and-green striped paper, topped with an extravagantly large bow, like a red dahlia had perched there, sitting under the Christmas tree with a tag bearing my name. Those four books were all by John Steinbeck, a writer most kids today have read by ninth grade when they were assigned Of Mice and Men. In my junior high, however, we weren’t assigned novels. We read the short stories in our English literature textbook: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson; “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain. And I loved those stories, loved taking essay tests on them and discussing them in class, loved reading them and thinking about them. Why did Bartleby prefer not to? What would I do if I was the one chosen in “The Lottery”? Could I have sat through Simon Wheeler’s long story about Jim Smiley and his jumping frog?
But oh! A novel! And that Christmas of 1973, four novels!
“He’s really good,” my brother Skip said as I held that boxed set of Steinbeck in my hands. I wonder now if he saw that his gift made me cry? Somehow, he knew the real me; knew that I was someone who wanted nothing more than to read books; knew that, as C. S. Lewis said, “You can never get a book long enough to suit me.” Two of those Steinbeck books were big, fat ones, the kind I loved to read most: The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. The other two were slender: Of Mice and Men and Travels with Charley.
Skip was telling me how Steinbeck had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. But I had no idea of the import of those prizes, or even what the distinction between them was. I managed to say thank you and to give him a quick kiss on his bearded cheek before I slipped away. Alone, with the twenty-four hours of Christmas music playing on the radio downstairs and the smell of Mama Rose’s baking lasagna wafting up to me, I tore off the plastic and let the books drop from the box into my lap. I touched each cover in turn, held each book in my hand, opened to random pages. “Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime . . .” “I remember about the rabbits, George . . .” “All great and precious things are lonely . . .” And then this: “To the red country and part of the gray of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
I read that first line of The Grapes of Wrath, and I couldn’t stop.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH was published on April 14, 1939. Steinbeck wrote it in just four months, from June to October of 1938, when he was thirty-six years old. He put himself on a writing schedule to complete the novel in 100 days, averaging 2,000 words a day. Though some days, when the pressures of his life intruded (houseguests, buying and renovating a ranch) he only wrote 800 words, other days he wrote as many as 2,200. On October 26, he wrote the final 775 words and beneath them, in inch-and-a-half-high letters: “END.”
Steinbeck had that ending in mind from the start, an image that he wrote toward, something the writer John Irving does too. “I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters,” Irving told The Paris Review in 1986. “I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don’t know the ending first?”
When I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, so many things about writing a novel became clear to me. Plot. Character. Conflict. Escalating stakes. Metaphor. The Grapes of Wrath begins with a drought and ends with a flood. Years later I would hear a lecture by a writer on this very device, which she called the rules of polarity. In my own novel The Knitting Circle, the protagonist, Mary, is empty-handed, both literally and emotionally, at the beginning; the final image is of abundance, Mary holding so much yarn that her arms are overflowing. When the Joads are in a rain-soaked barn at the end, I understood the impact of such a polarity.
In that barn they encounter a starving man and his son, whom the father had given their last bit of food. The dying man needs soup or milk to survive. The eldest Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon, has had a stillborn child. Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon “looked deep into each other,” and Rose of Sharon says, “Yes.” Ma smiles: “I knowed you would. I knowed.”